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4 decades later, new trial of alleged 1980 Paris synagogue bomber offers victims opportunity for closure
PARIS (JTA) — The courtroom was crowded but the defendant’s seat was empty on Monday as a landmark trial in French Jewish history got underway, nearly 43 years after the synagogue bombing that Hassan Diab stands accused of orchestrating.
An arrest warrant in the 1980 bombing that killed four people and wounded 46 was first issued for Diab, a Lebanese academic who lives in Canada, in 2008. Only now is a trial getting underway — and he has chosen not to attend, prompting criticism from both prosecutors and French Jews who are hoping for a sense of resolution after decades of trauma.
“Hassan Diab’s decision not to appear before your court is a great disgrace to your jurisdiction,” the attorney general said during the first day of the trial, during a discussion of whether an arrest warrant should be issued, a move that would require the trial to be dismissed.
“Which human would not make the same decision?” replied Diab’s lawyer, William Bourdon, about his client’s choice not to travel to France to stand trial. “This decision is humanly respectable. It is in no way a sign of cowardice.”
The Reform synagogue on Rue Copernic that was bombed is nested in the heart of a wealthy residential area, in Paris’ 16th arrondissement. A visitor today would not be able to tell that the ceiling had once been shattered into a million little pieces, that the floor had been spotted with blood. If not for the commemorative plaque at the entrance, nothing there would show the synagogue was once the scene of a deadly terrorist attack.
Yet the trial is freighted with the fear and anxiety that set in after what is now known as the Rue Copernic bombing on Oct. 3, 1980, understood to be the first fatal antisemitic attack in France since the Holocaust. Since then, a string of antisemitic attacks on communal targets and individuals have caused many French Jews to feel afraid, both about their personal vulnerability and about the state’s commitment to their safety.
But while the prosecution of some potentially antisemitic attacks has not always satisfied French Jews, the long ordeal to bring Diab to trial suggests great diligence on the part of many involved.
Bernard Cahen, an attorney for the synagogue and one of the victims, who is now in his 80s, promised he would see this case through until the end.
“Whatever the outcome, this has been going on for way too long,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview, adding with a joke, “Everybody is surprised I’m still here to represent my clients.”
Cahen represents Monique Barbé, who lost her husband in the bombing when she was 37. Now nearly 80 and living in the South of France, Barbé won’t be coming to the trial.
“I don’t have the strength. But I can’t wait for all of this to end,” she told JTA.
About 300 worshippers were attending the Shabbat service and celebrating five bar mitzvahs that Friday evening when, at 6:35 p.m., a bomb exploded right outside the synagogue. The door was blown up, the glass ceiling collapsed on the worshippers; wooden benches were projected across the room.
Outside the synagogue the scene was even more gruesome. In his book about the case, the French journalist Jean Chichizola described “cars thrown on the road like children’s toys,” “flames licking the upper floors of adjacent buildings” and “shop windows blown up all along the street.”
In what looked like a war zone lay four bodies. Israeli TV journalist Aliza Shagrir, 44, was hit by the blast as she walked by. Philippe Boissou, 22, who was riding by on his motorcycle, also died on the spot. Driver Jean-Michel Barbé was found dead in his car, which was parked right outside the synagogue where he was awaiting clients attending the service. Nearby, a hotel worker named Hilario Lopes-Fernandez was seriously injured and died two days later.
Investigators quickly established that the bomb had been placed in the saddlebag of a Suzuki motorcycle parked in front of the synagogue. It was meant to go off precisely as the worshippers left the building, which would undoubtedly have killed many more people. But the ceremony had started a few minutes late.
At first, a man close to a neo-Nazi group claimed responsibility for the attack, misleading investigators for months before confessing he had nothing to do with it. The attack was ultimately attributed to an extremist group in the Middle East, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations, and investigators alleged that Diab had planted the bomb. After an arrest warrant was issued in 2008, he was extradited from Canada in 2014, indicted in Paris and imprisoned.
But in a surprise to many, Diab’s case was dismissed in 2018, allowing him to return to Canada a free man. Prosecutors appealed, leading to another surprising turn of events in 2021 as the court upheld the earlier decision, directing Diab to stand trial after all.
“This is a gaping wound for the Jewish community and here in France people remember this horrible attack,” historian Marc Knobel told JTA. “Let us not forget how shocked and hurt we all were at the time.”
Indeed, outrage in the immediate aftermath of the bombing was fierce. France’s major trade unions called for a nationwide strike as a gesture of solidarity with Jews, while government ministers promised a speedy response and deployed police officers to other Jewish sites. Meanwhile, Jews marched in the streets, some vowing to take security into their own hands, in a demonstration that presaged longstanding tensions within French Jewry.
Over four decades later, Monique Barbé reflected on the tragedy that has changed her life forever.
“This has ruined my life. I was nervously wrecked for a very long time,” she said. “Imagine, I had to go identify my husband’s body. At the police station, they gave me back his half-burnt ID card and his damaged wedding ring. That’s all I was left with.”
But she questioned exactly how much the bombing and trial should register for people whose connection is more distant than her own.
“I do believe this is a necessary trial but except for those who lost their loved ones, I don’t see why anybody would still think about it today, it’s been so long,” Barbé said. “Plus there have been so many terrorist attacks since.”
Jean-François Bensahel, president of the Copernic synagogue, thinks this trial is actually of great importance even to those who were not born at the time of the attack.
“It’s engraved in our community’s history,” he said in an interview. “It’s difficult for us to understand why Hassan Diab has decided not to come to the trial but nothing is over yet. I want to trust justice will be served.”
The attack’s most lasting effects may not be in the trial but in the heavy security infrastructure that is now familiar to anyone engaging with French Jewish institutions, Bensahel said.
“Sadly, synagogues in France (and many other places) are all under protection, even though it’s completely counterintuitive to have security measures in a place of worship where you usually aspire to peace,” he said. “It shows something is not right with the world.”
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The 7 political stories Jews will be watching in 2026
This year brought sweeping change in national politics, in the U.S.-Israel relationship and in New York, the city with the largest Jewish population.
At the Forward, we closely tracked the transition to President Trump’s second term and profiled his cabinet selections and controversial nominees and appointees who trafficked in antisemitism or had ties to white nationalists and expressed admiration for Nazis. We covered the president’s crackdown on the pro-Palestinian campus protests that defined 2024 and the weaponization of antisemitism that led to multimillion dollar settlements with Ivy League universities, including Columbia and Cornell.
We provided exclusive, on-the-ground reporting on the battle for the Jewish vote in the competitive New York City mayoral race. We conducted the first Jewish-media interview with Zohran Mamdani as his campaign began gaining traction, even while he was still polling a distant second in the Democratic primary. We also had inside access to the outgoing Eric Adams administration and its effort to counter rising antisemitism, and had the only local reporter accompanying Adams on his farewell trip to Israel.
Here are the seven political stories we’ll be watching most closely in 2026 that will shape American politics and the Jewish community in the U.S. and abroad.
Zohran Mamdani’s New York City
Mamdani will be sworn into office at midnight on Jan. 1, 2026 as the city’s first Muslim mayor. The swearing-in will be followed by an inauguration ceremony that day at a yet-undisclosed location.
He will immediately face a series of tests on the promises and priorities that carried him through the historic campaign at a moment when the city’s Jewish community remains divided over his stance on Israel. Mamdani’s mixed response to the protest outside the Park East Synagogue, which featured anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans last month, is likely to come under fresh scrutiny as his term begins. Mamdani has remained mum on whether he’d support new legislation that would create a buffer zone outside houses of worship to protect congregants from targeted protests.
Mamdani will also have to decide whether to rescind a recent executive order by Adams barring city agencies from participating in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions efforts. He will also determine the fate of the recently-created mayor’s office to combat antisemitism, which has pursued a measure adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. And he will need to decide whether to continue the New York City–Israel Economic Council, an initiative to strengthen economic ties with the Jewish state.
He will file top City Hall and government positions, including the potential appointments of his senior Jewish advisers.
Last month, Mamdani announced he’ll reappoint Jessica Tisch, the Jewish NYC police commissioner, as head of the police department he promised to reform.
The battle for the Jewish vote in the governor’s race
Mamdani’s first months in office and his legislative agenda will also shape the New York governor’s race.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, running for reelection for another full term, endorsed Mamdani in the general election after remaining neutral during the primary. She has signaled reservations about several key Mamdani priorities, like universal free buses, which will need the state’s approval, and has also distanced herself from Mamdani on Israel.
Hochul’s embrace of Mamdani could bolster her standing in the Democratic primary, where she faces a left-wing challenge from her lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, who is married to a Jewish woman.
But it could also complicate her outreach to Jewish voters in the general election. Bruce Blakeman, the first Jewish executive of Nassau County on Long Island, and Rep. Elise Stefanik, an upstate congresswoman who has made the fight against antisemitism on college campuses central to her congressional brand, are competing in a GOP primary to challenge Hochul. In 2022, former Rep. Lee Zeldin came within five percentage points of winning the governor’s race, powered by strong Jewish support.
Who will win Jerry Nadler’s seat?
After serving 17 terms in Congress, Rep. Jerry Nadler, co-chair of the Congressional Jewish Caucus, is set to retire to pave the way for generational change, a race that will be closely watched locally and across the nation.
The Manhattan district has one of the largest Jewish electorates in the nation. Jews in the 12th Congressional District account for about 30% of the vote in the Democratic primary. Nadler has, in recent years, campaigned on the need to preserve New York City’s Jewish representation in Congress.
The Jewish candidates vying for the seat include Micah Lasher, Jack Schlossberg, and Cameron Kasky. Assemblymember Alex Bores, whose wife, Darya Moldavskaya, is Jewish, and Councilmember Erik Bottcher are also considered viable candidates. Lasher, a protege of Nadler, has the longtime Jewish congressman’s support. Schlossberg, the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy, has made funding for security measures at synagogues and Jewish institutions a central pillar of his campaign.
Other New York congressional races
There are a few other House races in New York where pro-Israel incumbents are facing challenges from the left. Those primary contests are a crucial test of whether support for Israel and an alliance with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has become a political liability.
Rep. Dan Goldman, the Jewish congressman representing the north of Brooklyn and the Lower Manhattan district since 2023, is being challenged in the primary by Brad Lander, the outgoing city comptroller and former mayoral candidate, who has the backing of Mamdani and other progressive firebrands. For his campaign, Lander hired Morris Katz, a Jewish strategist and ad maker who was behind Mamdani’s successful working-class appeal and inspiring TV commercials. Katz produced Lander’s Mr. Rogers-themed launch video.
Lander, who is also Jewish, has become more vocal about Palestinian rights in recent years. He supported Ben & Jerry’s decision to end sales in the occupied West Bank in 2021 and has regularly attended a weekly rally against the Israeli government’s handling of the war in Gaza. Recently, he acknowledged that he divested from Israel Bonds in 2023, ending the city’s decades-long practice of investing millions in Israeli government debt securities. In his candidacy announcement, Lander slammed Goldman’s support for the war in Gaza and accused him of “doing AIPAC’s bidding,” though the incumbent had early on called for humanitarian pauses and criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership.
Rep. Ritchie Torres, a three-term pro-Israel progressive from the Bronx, is facing three primary challengers, a crowded field that could ultimately make it easier for him to win reelection. Michael Blake, a former state legislator who ran for mayor in the Democratic primary and later endorsed Mamdani, is making attacks on AIPAC central to his campaign, and Dalourny Nemorin, an organizer for the Democratic Socialists of America’s local chapter, is testing the momentum behind newcomer and socialist candidates. Assemblywoman Amanda Septimo, who joined an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel in 2016 and visited Israel again following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, also announced her candidacy. Septimo is considered a member of Mamdani’s inner circle.
Rep. Michael Lawler, a Republican who has been a strong pro-Israel voice since his election in 2022, is expected to face the winner of an eight-person Democratic primary in a tough election cycle for Republicans. Lawler has the support of the growing Hasidic population in Rockland County. The leading candidates in the Democratic primary are Rockland County Legislator Beth Davidson, who is Jewish, and Army veteran Cait Conley.
Michigan Senate race a test for Democrats’ positions on Israel
The Michigan Senate race is shaping up to be one of the clearest tests of the Democratic coalition and of how the party navigates Israel.
The leading candidates in the Democratic primary are Abdul El-Sayed, an Egyptian-American who is seeking to channel the energy of the 2024 Uncommitted movement and build on Mamdani’s surprise success in New York, and Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel Democrat who defeated progressive Jewish Rep. Andy Levin in 2022 with significant help from AIPAC.
The outcome of the contest will offer an early read on whether the left’s anti-establishment momentum can break through in a battleground state, and how much pro-Israel groups retain their influence in Democratic primaries.
The Jewish governors running for reelection
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are widely expected to win reelection. Their margins, messages and national profile will position both as major figures in the early mix for the 2028 presidential race. Each is navigating the same balancing act that will challenge Democrats with national ambitions: trying to appeal to a base that is growing more critical of Israel while still keeping the trust of Jewish voters and pro-Israel allies.
Shapiro, who was viewed as a potential first Jewish president in 2024, remains on the narrow path he has carved out for himself. He highlights his Jewish identity, support for Israel and bipartisan appeal in all of his public appearances.
Pritzker, who governs a state with one of the largest Palestinian-American populations in the country, has become one of the most prominent voices of resistance to President Donald Trump. He has repeatedly invoked Nazi Germany in criticizing the administration’s policies and endorsed a Senate push to block U.S. arms sales to Israel to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israeli elections
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will continue to be in the headlines in America. He is expected to spend New Year’s Eve in the United States after yet another meeting with Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort — the sixth meeting this year — underscoring the unusually close alignment between the two leaders.
Netanyahu is better known to Americans than most world leaders. He is now Israel’s longest-tenured prime minister, having served for more than 18 years as the country’s leader. He grew up in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, attended college and graduate school in Boston, served as Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. in the mid-1980s, and has delivered four speeches to a joint session of Congress.
Following three tumultuous years, Israeli voters are poised to head back to the ballot box sometime in 2026 — depending on how long the coalition government holds onto power amid legislative challenges — for what will effectively be another referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership. A January 2024 poll found that only 15% of Israelis, including 36% of those who had previously voted for his Likud Party, wanted to see Netanyahu stay on as prime minister following the failure to protect Israel on Oct. 7.
But the landscape has shifted dramatically since then.
All living hostages have been freed, and the remains of all those held by Hamas — but for one — have been returned. Hamas and Hezbollah leaders have been killed, and Iran’s nuclear program was set back after the 12-day war earlier this year, and the conflict in Gaza ended on terms jointly shaped by Washington and Jerusalem. Netanyahu, receiving the political backing from Trump, has also requested a pre-conviction pardon from Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Meanwhile, the opposition remains fractured among several would-be successors, complicating a unified challenge to Netanyahu’s rule.
A majority of American Jews hold an unfavorable view of Netanyahu and senior pro-Israel Democrats have called for a leadership change in Israel.
Netanyahu is also expected to visit New York City, at the latest next September when he comes to address the annual United Nations General Assembly, which will test Mamdani’s pledge to order his arrest if he visits Manhattan.
The post The 7 political stories Jews will be watching in 2026 appeared first on The Forward.
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How Eastern Europe’s Jews celebrated a merry ‘nitl’ Christmas
(JTA) — Call me a softie, but I love a traditional Christmas Eve. If you don’t find me eating Chinese food and watching a movie, I might be catching Gotham Comedy Club’s “A Very Jewish Christmas!” show or comedian Joel Chasnoff’s “Christmas for the Jews.” Or I may just stay home, light a fire and listen to “Oy to the World: A Klezmer Christmas” by The Klezmonauts.
If none of that is your idea of traditional, you might want to get a copy of Jordan Chad’s new book, “Christmas in the Yiddish Tradition.”
A multidisciplinary researcher affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Jewish Studies, Chad offers up the “untold story” of how Yiddish-speaking Jews “celebrated” Christmas — not as the birth of the baby Jesus, heaven forbid. On what they called “Nitl-nacht,” or just plain “Nitl,” Jews cut loose with games and drink and a vacation from Torah studies in ways that ran parallel with what their Christian neighbors were up to.
And if that sounds like a provocation, Chad agrees.
“When I use the term ‘Jews celebrated Christmas,’ what’s really important to understand is that Christmas wasn’t interpreted as a Christian holiday by the Jews,” he said.
The idea of Jews enjoying Christmas Eve also runs counter to the stories Jews told after they left their Yiddish roots behind and encountered the New World. There, memories were shaped and distorted, and nitl was remembered as a night of fear and superstition. The lore holds that Jews stayed inside, locked their doors, avoided Torah study and huddled against the threat of antisemitic violence.
But Chad, 31, a translator with a background in theoretical physics (which makes him a Yiddishist physicist, which is very fun to say), suspected there was more to the story of Jews and Christmas. That hunch led him deep into Yiddish memoirs and folklore.
What he found startled him. Again and again, memoirists writing about 19th- and early 20th-century Eastern Europe wrote of their favorite “holiday”: nitl, commonly understood as a contraction of a Yiddish term meaning “not learning.”
Chad says that the version of Christmas as a season of foreboding is less remembrance than reinvention. Contemporary Yiddish accounts suggest that the holiday was more benign and even playful.
The key, he argues, is that for Jews and Christians alike, Dec. 24 was not so much a specifically Christian observance as a midwinter festival layered with supernatural anxiety, drinking, feasting and folk rituals. Easter was the central Christian holiday — and the actual season when Christians attacked Jews. By contrast, Christmas fell in the darkest season of the year and was marked with topsy-turvy behavior rife with pagan hand-me-downs, including the Christmas tree. Celebrants would suspend ordinary routines, play cards, tell ghost stories and stay awake to ward off malevolent spirits.
“Christians were doing this, and so were Jews,” Chad said. “It was common European folk culture.”
Only later, in part as a reaction to the revelry and their own encounter with the New World, did church leaders put the Christ back in Christmas, emphasizing the birth of Jesus. “In Europe, nobody was going to forget about Christianity,” Chad explained. “But in the New World, Jesus’s birth really needed to be the part of Christmas that Christians promoted.”
Once Christmas became more explicitly Christian, Jews distanced themselves. In the process, they retrofitted their own memories.
The ominous folklore about Christmas that was also part of Jewish tradition — for example, that Jesus might visit Jewish homes on Christmas eve to poison their drink with blood — was newly emphasized by Jews, turning a night of fun into a warning about assimilation. Stories about the dangers of Christmas — even when exaggerated — helped reinforce a sense of Jewish distinctiveness in a Christian-majority culture.
“Jewish immigrants weren’t going to tell their children, ‘When we were kids, we had a blast on Christmas Eve,’” Chad said. Instead, they leaned on reinterpretations that cast nitl as a defensive measure — a night too dangerous to study Torah, a holiday marked only by negation.
Chad consistently argues that Yiddish-speaking Jews were not cut off from the wider Christian culture, even if they had different religious structures, calendars and social and material status.
“I’d call it common European folk culture,” he said. “There were enormous differences between Jews and Christians — but when it came to fear of midwinter demons, the love of drinking, or the topsy-turvy atmosphere of Christmas Eve, the folklore overlaps are undeniable.”
Chad also draws a direct line between the “Yiddish” Christmas and the various ways Jews to continue to mark the Yuletide season. In many Hasidic communities, nitl is still a night when Torah study is suspended. If these Orthodox Jews aren’t playing cards or chess, they might be catching up on chores. Meanwhile, those Jewish events on Christmas Eve have become a growth industry, from singles-only “Matzo Balls” to Jewish cabarets to Christmas classics sung in Yiddish.
And then there’s Chinese food and a movie. Chad suggests that only in the late 20th century did Jews begin to reclaim Christmas as a kind of unofficial holiday of their own. By the 1980s, eating at Chinese restaurants — traditionally among the few places open — became a way to distinguish the day without crossing into Christian ritual. (As Darlene Love sang on “Saturday Night Live”: “They can finally see ‘King Kong’ without waiting in line / They can eat in Chinatown and drink their sweet-ass wine.”) What once was avoidance evolved into a playful counter-tradition, a way to be present in the surrounding culture without being absorbed by it.
If the book has a deeper message, it is that Jews have always negotiated Christmas, just in different registers. Sometimes the day has been used to draw lines; sometimes to soften them. It is all part of the ongoing Jewish effort to live distinctly within a world shaped by someone else’s holiday.
What emerges in “Christmas in the Yiddish Tradition” is not a sentimental argument for reviving a lost holiday, nor a polemic against drawing firm boundaries between Us and Them. It’s a reminder that Jewish life in Eastern Europe was far richer, weirder and more porous than memory often allows.
“I hope people understand that Jews didn’t think they were celebrating a Christian holiday,” Chad said. “They were celebrating a midwinter holiday they considered their own.”
He paused, then added with a laugh: “And they had a pretty good time doing it.”
The post How Eastern Europe’s Jews celebrated a merry ‘nitl’ Christmas appeared first on The Forward.
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Hanukkah shooting leaves at least 10 dead at Australia’s most popular beach
A Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach turned deadly on Sunday with reports of at least 10 dead, including a Chabad rabbi, amid rising antisemitism in Australia.
One suspect was killed at the scene and the other was arrested, in what local police are calling a “terror incident.”
“This is an attack on the Jewish community that deeply that pains us,” said Robert Gregory, the chief executive of the Australian Jewish Association.
Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who worked with Chabad of Bondi, was killed in the shooting, Chabad’s media director told The New York Times.
“This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”
Earlier this month, a group of Jewish leaders from Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States met in Sydney to coordinate responses to rising antisemitism there and internationally.
In recent months, two synagogues have been attacked in Melbourne.
The post Hanukkah shooting leaves at least 10 dead at Australia’s most popular beach appeared first on The Forward.